The Cult Section

The Seths pass out in a sensory deprivation tank filled with a mysterious truck-themed selzter and trip out into primordial versions of themselves as they watch Ken Russell's proto-walk-and-talk psychedelic journey "Altered States" (1980) starring William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban and Charles Haid. Are psychedelics the true path to enlightenment? Will Edward Jessop defeat his own ego, the criticism of his team of sycophantic chums, the unconditional love of his wife and family and a hand-stabbing hellish blood ritual to find himself and the true meaning of existence? Is William Hurt still hot as a cro-magnon carnivore? We'll grasp blindly in the dark under the thousand eyes of a goat angel in search of these answers and many more this week on The Cult Section!

This week on The Cult Section, we dig into an old graveyard to unearth the 1990 Clive Barker monstertpiece "Nightbreed!" It's a surprise sideways return to Cronenmonth as the Seths travel to a cursed Canadian "town" in search of answers to the REAL questions... Is everything true? Is Oz over the rainbow? Is God an astronaut? Is Midian where the monsters live? Only Craig Sheffer, Anne Bobby and David Conenberg and one of the most bizarre ensemble casts ever assembled know for sure, and they'll tell you all about it in the darkest ways possible - if you're destined to know! We'll follow Boone, a man cursed from the start who finds escape in disturbing dreams and in the arms of his unflappable girlfriend Lori, a woman who knows no fear - as the two go up against centuries of stigma, militarized police, serial killers, seedy motels and wisecracking morticians in pursuit of darkest destiny.

Warning - this week's film is so intense, it just might make your head explode! Join the Seths as they discuss David Cronenberg's first big US-market breakthrough and only film that opened at #1 at the box office, the 1981 game-changing, cranium-bursting paranoid thrillride "Scanners," starring Steven Lack, Michael Ironside, Jennifer O'Neill and Patrick McGoohan! We'll try and hear each other's thoughts, investigate human experimentation at the hands of corporate defense contractors, join a psychic hippie commune, dodge bullet-storms with weird fringe artists while trying to psychogenically keep our blood pressure down - this week on The Cult Section!

Did you like the new "Dune" films, but wish Paul Atreides held more TED talks in them? Would you be excited for a sitcom called "My Eight Dads" featuring a young Muad'Dib and his bevy of helpful mentors? We have the film for you! Join the Seths this week as they dig deep into the desert sand, staying wary of wormsign in this week's feautured film, David Lynch's controversial (mostly to Lynch) 1984 production of "Dune," starring... everyone! This absurdly star-studded cast includes early-career Kyle MacLachlan, Virgina Madsen and Sean Young, a pre-Trek Patrick Stewart, Dean Stockwell, José Ferrer, Jürgen Prochnow (guess who's back? back again?), Max Von Sydow, Sting and dozens more professional actors at the top of their game. So...what went wrong? Trying to fit a thousand-page, gloissary-festooned sprawling novel into a three-hour film? Content so disturbing it challenges even a contemporary threshhold for depravity? We'll figure it out together this week on The Cult Section!

On The Cult Section this week, dessert eats you! When a mysterious ice-cream-like substance is found to be irresistably delicious, it's rushed to market where an ignorant and all-too-eager public greedily devours it with a fervor that's out of this world (or...within it?) in Larry Cohen's 1985 tongue-in-cheek takedown of consumerism and fad culture, "THE STUFF," starring Michael Moriarty, Scott Bloom and Andrea Marcovicci. This is a truly wild one that likely flew under the radar of many moviegoers, but what it lacks in budget it more that makes up for in style, craft, and ambition, as well as a slew of cameos from screen legends like Garrett Morris, Danny Aiello and Paul Sorvino. Join the Seths as they follow corporate spy "Moe" Rutherford and a ragtag band of misfit anti-stuffies through a labyrinth of boat-bound boardrooms, hastily-assembled factories, flaming hotel rooms and libertarian militia-run radio stations in a quest to avert global dessert-based disaster. You won't be able to get enough of...The Stuff.

We'll show you the Life of the Mind this week, as the Seths tackle the Coen Brothers' 1991 perhaps-most-off-kilter entry, "Barton Fink," starring John Turturro and John Goodman. Follow Fink as he, bolstered by some success on the New York stage and emboldened by his irrepressible ego, makes the unlikely move to Hollywood where he hopes to make it big telling highly intellectualized stories of the working class. As he knows it. But the promise of early success starts to slip away as Fink must deal with manic studio bosses, jarring meetings with former heroes, a mysterious murder, a suspiciously decaying hotel, sweaty wrestlers and invisible mosquitoes. Critics loved the film, but audiences were perplexed by its subtle satire and oddly placed humor within an otherwise darkly dramatic exploration into the soul of an artist, and the struggles inherent to bringing personal work to the public eye.

Hey, friends! It's time to relive your childhood nightmares - or make new ones (its never too late!) as we Return to Oz with the 1985 Walter Murch classic of the same name. Rejoin a perplexingly younger Dorothy as she paradoxically recovers from the Oz trauma she lived out in the course of the tornado that left her Kansas homestead half-destroyed and her guardians dismayed. Fairuza Balk dazzles us with her big-screen debut, doiung great credit to the character of Dorothy as she begins new Oz adventures starting in a cozy ol' Sanitarium! Is it all a dream, or is young Dorothy going back to find old friends and make (in one case literally) new ones in a quest to end the reign of a wicked queen and a mysterious mountain king? No need to click your heels, you're safe with the Seths and Sonic as we dive back in to L. Frank Baum's demented world of imagination.

Welcome to The Cult Section (with Seth & Seth)! Join the Seths and producer Sonic this week on our premiere episode, focusing on one of our favorite cult films of all time, Alex Cox's 1984 cinematic debut "Repo Man," starring Emilio Estevez (in his breakout role) and Harry Dean Stanton. This totemic anthem to the dark underbelly of the American Dream, set against the seemingly contemporarily-apocalyptic backdrop of Cold War-era Los Angeles, the film is chock full of quotable lines, abstract political commentary, conspiracies, obtuse federal agencies, unique characters, and doses of masculinity both toxic and touching. In each installment, we'll be examining a film we love, one we've stumbled across, or one recommended by an occasional guest - or one recommended by YOU, the viewer / listener! So come on in to our very own Video Store of the Mind, and and help us build out its most glorious shelf, The Cult Section!